In her practice, Josephine Pryde explores modes of creation, consumption, and production of images, most often through photography. Employing a wide range of technical means, she takes up ideas conveyed through camera-generated images, in order to challenge and re-examine established modes of reception and expectation as to how the visible may be rendered.

How Frequency The Eye continues Pryde’s recent reflections on perception, cognition, and language, and her questions as to how an exhibition of artworks may articulate such concerns. In conjunction with prior works and a short film, the exhibition features a new series of photographs in which the artist interrogates interplays between the eye and consciousness.

Against the background of ever-emerging technological imaging systems, Pryde’s works both acknowledge the physicality of vision, while also speculating on the workings of our imagination. Studies on perception have shown that only a small percentage of what we ‘see’ comes from light waves processed by the brain; far more than half of ‘seeing’ consists of memories with which the mind gives meaning to visual patterns that have been decoded by the brain.[1] Thus, seeing is not merely passive but an active engagement, in which we continuously draw on the unconscious and interact with technologies and devices that generate and convey images.

For her new series, consisting of the sequences Television, Potholes, Causeway (W2–A1), and Stones (all 2024), Pryde manipulates the camera’s view of her subjects by employing a specially developed lens extension. Fuzzy edges of the image are reminiscent of the blurry vision experienced through rising tears. Images draw near and recede again, reminding us of the physicalities of seeing, frequently intertwining with the complex fabric of our memories. Although there was once an object that was photographed, the choice of what was to be photographed and how the object was seen remain as questions within the frame.

An architectural installation in what is both the first and also last room of the exhibition mirrors the transparent structure of the conservatory at Haus am Waldsee, establishing a perceptual framework that also spatially reflects movements between interior and exterior. Each element of the display contributes to a constellation highlighting operations beyond the visual, insisting throughout on the influence of what is not seen upon what is.

[1] Cf. Barbara Stevens Sullivan, The Mystery of Analytical Work: Weavings from Jung and Bion (London: Routledge, 2010), p. 70.

Trailer Josephine Pryde. How Frequency The Eye

The exhibition is supported by: